“Podcasts have officially overtaken AM/FM talk radio as the more popular medium for spoken-word audio in the United States,” reports TechCrunch, citing Edison Research’s Share of Ear survey:The researchers have tracked these statistics over the last decade, and almost always, the percentage of time people spent listening to podcasts increased, while their time with spoken radio broadcasts...

“Billions fewer birds are flying through North American skies than decades ago,” reports the Associated Press, “and their population is shrinking ever faster, mostly due to a combination of intensive agriculture and warming temperatures, a new study found.”Nearly half of the 261 species studied showed big enough losses in numbers to be statistically significant and more than half of those...

Slashdot reader darwinmac writes: The Document Foundation (TDF), the organization behind LibreOffice, has decided to bring back its LibreOffice Online project which been inactive since 2022. Collabora, a company that was a major contributor to the original LibreOffice Online, is not pleased with this development. After the original project went dormant, Collabora forked the code and created its...

In a library in Florence, Italy, historian Ivan Malara noticed handwritten notes on a book printed in the 1500s — and recognized the handwriting as Galileo’s. The finding “promises new insights into one of the most famous ideological transitions in the history of science,” writes Science magazine — since the book Galileo annotated was a reprint of Ptolemy’s second-century work arguing that...

An anonymous reader shared this report from the blogIt’s FOSS:Greg Kroah-Hartman has updated the projected end-of-life (EOL) dates for several active longterm support kernels via a commit. The provided reasoning? It was done “based on lots of discussions with different companies and groups and the other stable kernel maintainer.” The other maintainer is Sasha Levin, who co-maintains these Linux...

It’s not exactly going analog, but people looking to move away from streaming say Apple’s old device is a small step away from constantly being online.

Anthropic’s Claude AI assistant “jumped to the No. 2 slot on Apple’s chart of top U.S. free apps late on Friday,” reports CNBC:The rise in popularity suggests that Anthropic is benefiting from its presence in news headlines, stemming from its refusal to have its models used for mass domestic surveillance or for fully autonomous weapons… OpenAI’s ChatGPT sat at No. 1 on the App Store rankings on...

In a 9,000-word expose, a writer for Harper’s visited San Francisco’s young entrepreneurs in September to mockingly profile “tech’s new generation and the end of thinking.” There’s Cluely founder Roy Lee. (“His grand contribution to the world was a piece of software that told people what to do.”) And the Rationalist movement’s Scott Alexander, who “would probably have a very easy time starting...

Saturday afternoon Sam Altman announced he’d start answering questions on X.com about OpenAI’s work with America’s Department of War — and all the developments over the past few days. (After that department’s negotions had failed with Anthropic, they announced they’d stop using Anthropic’s technology and threatened to designate it a “Supply-Chain Risk to National Security”. Then they’d...